Dinosaur unit study

Welcome to our incredibly rich, hugely fun Dinosaurs Unit Study! Honestly, we had a ball studying up about dinosaurs in our little homeschool. This Dinosaur unit study has a little bit of everything, from history to science to art and maths.

Creating Simple Dinosaur Dress up for my Little Ones

We began our unit study with Bumpus Jumpus Dinosaurumpus by Tony Mitton:

Oh my, but we do love this rhythmical, singsongy book. The girls already knew the words off by heart so we (far too loudly) did a reading of it to put us in the mood for some dinosaur boogying!

As you can see, our outfit began with a homemade pair of dinosaur feet. I mean, who doesn’t love a pair of tissue box feet?! These dino feet were so simple to make, using just felt, tissue boxes and double sided sticky tape. Um, how cool are these…?

You can also see the dinosaur masks the girls made resting on the feet above. These were just simple masks that they coloured in:

Dancing like a Dinosaur

For the full delights of my girls flinging themselves around to the ‘Dinosaurusrumpus’ head over to the post I wrote about week one of our dinosaur units study:

Growing Our Own Dinosaur

Another great fun book is ‘How to Grow a Dinosaur’. Obviously my powers do not extend to actually growing a dinosaur but I had some activities planned which I thought would go along nicely with the book. You can find all the details here, but the girls painted some clay dinosaurs, completed a dinosaur puzzle and played with their dinosaur toys:

After which we got to the real activity of actually building our own dinosaur. So I guess you could say that I did indeed grow a dinosaur…

although it looked a little like a rather old ET:

For instructions on how this wonder was grown (or indeed built) head on over to my ‘Build and ABandTosaurus‘ (named so because Abigail, Becca and Thomas built it!).

Learning about the Stegosaurus in our Dinosaur Unit Study

We learnt about the dinosaurs from the Thyreophora group. Thyreophora means ‘shield bearers’ and is an example of an ornithiscia dinosaur, meaning it has bird type hips. We used the Stegosaurus as an example and learnt that it is an armoured dinosaur with bird hips.

The girls did lots of writing:

The girls also did some Stegosaurus maths, geography, art and sewing:

Dinosaur Unit Study Experiment 1: How a Dinosaur Uses Gizzard Stones to Digest its Food

This was such an easy and demonstrative experiment, introducing the girls to the idea of scientific enquiry. I wrote a whole separate post for it: An Experiment to Demonstrate how Gastroliths Work so do go over and take a look.

Dinosaur Dig

The last thing we did during the Stegosaurus week was a dinosaur dig. I will link to the post I wrote below, but needless to say this was incredibly messy, incredibly inclusive (it drew siblings like a bee to honey!) and incredibly fun. I bought these on line, and the girls has a blast. Did I mention it was messy?!

And, yes they did find some stegosaurus ‘bones’ amount all the mess:

Please do head over to my  Stegasaurus post for more details on individual items or activities.

Dinosaur Unit Study: Triceratops

The next dinosaur we studied was a Triceratops. Triceratops are Ornithiscia (bird hipped dinosaurs) and are known as Cerapods. Cerapods include both Ornithopods (bird footed) and Ceratopsian (horned faced). You can probably guess which one the triceratops is? Yup, it’s a Ceratopsian!

We did lots of dinosaur writing and many maths activities themed around the Triceratops. Head over to the Triceratops post if you’d like more details.

Tricerotops

Diplodocus

Tyrannosaurus Rex

How to have an Authentic Paleontologist Dig

How to make your own Sedimentary rock